At least five persons have been detained in connection with the August 25 blasts in Mumbai and a manhunt launched for another suspect even as the police indicated that they stumbled upon evidence, which may point to their alleged involvement in the explosions.

Maharashtra Minister of State for Home Kripashankar Singh said the five had been picked up for questioning from different parts of the state.

Police sources said of the five persons, three were picked up on Saturday night for questioning from a Mumbai suburb on the basis of a description given by Shivnarain Vasudev Pandey, the driver of the taxi in which the bomb was planted at Gateway of India.

Sketches of the suspects had been circulated to all police stations in Maharashtra and police teams had been despatched to various places to trace them.

Pandey had disclosed that a family of two men and a woman had hired his taxi in suburban Andheri on August 25 for sight-seeing and asked him to proceed to Gateway of India where they broke journey for lunch.

Pandey returned after 30 minutes to find that his taxi was blown off in the blast. He then volunteered to cooperate with the police.

For the first time after 1993 blasts, RDX was used in the two explosions. Police are finding out the source of RDX. They are probing whether it came from outside the country or was a residue of the explosives used in the 1993 serial blasts in Mumbai.

However, police sources said the possibility of RDX coming from outside the country was stronger although they did not rule out the suspicion that the explosives may have been part of the consignment smuggled before the 1993 blasts.